Let me start with a secret: I feel self-conscious when I use the terms “AI” and “artificial intelligence.” Sometimes, I’m downright embarrassed by them.

Before I get into why, though, answer this question: what pops into your head when you hear the phrase artificial intelligence?

For the layperson, AI might still conjure HAL’s unblinking red eye, and all the misfortune that ensued when he became so tragically confused. Others jump to the replicants of Blade Runner or more recent movie robots. Those who have been around the field for some time, though, might instead remember the “old days” of AI — whether with nostalgia or a shudder — when intelligence was thought to primarily involve logical reasoning, and truly intelligent machines seemed just a summer’s work away. And for those steeped in today’s big-data-obsessed tech industry, “AI” can seem like nothing more than a high-falutin’ synonym for the machine-learning and predictive-analytics algorithms that are already hard at work optimizing and personalizing the ads we see and the offers we get — it’s the term that gets trotted out when we want to put a high sheen on things.

Like the Internet of Things, Web 2.0, and big data, AI is discussed and debated in many different contexts by people with all sorts of motives and backgrounds: academics, business types, journalists, and technologists. As with these other nebulous technologies, it’s no wonder the meaning of AI can be hard to pin down; everyone sees what they want to see. But AI also has serious historical baggage, layers of meaning and connotation that have accreted over generations of university and industrial research, media hype, fictional accounts, and funding cycles. It’s turned into a real problem: without a lot of context, it’s impossible to know what someone is talking about when they talk about AI.

Let’s look at one example. In his 2004 book On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins confidently and categorically states that AI failed decades ago. Meanwhile, the data scientist John Foreman can casually discuss the “AI models” being deployed every day by data scientists, and Marc Andreessen can claim that enterprise software products have already achieved AI. It’s such an overloaded term that all of these viewpoints are valid; they’re just starting from different definitions.

Which gets back to the embarrassment factor: I know what I mean when I talk about AI, at least I think I do, but I’m also painfully aware of all these other interpretations and associations the term evokes. And I’ve learned over the years that the picture in my head is almost always radically different from that of the person I’m talking to. That is, what drives all this confusion is the fact that different people rely on different primal archetypes of AI.

Let’s explore these archetypes, in the hope that making them explicit might provide the foundation for a more productive set of conversations in the future.

AI as interlocutor. This is the concept behind both HAL and Siri: a computer we can talk to in plain language, and that answers back in our own lingo. Along with Apple’s personal assistant, systems like Cortana and Watson represent steps toward this ideal: they aim to meet us on our own ground, providing answers as good as — or better than — those we could get from human experts. Many of the most prominent AI research and product efforts today fall under this model, probably because it’s such a good fit for the search- and recommendation-centric business models of today’s Internet giants. This is also the version of AI enshrined in Alan Turing’s famous test for machine intelligence, though it’s worth noting that direct assaults on that test have succeeded onlyby gaming the metric.

AI as android. Another prominent notion of AI views disembodied voices, however sophisticated their conversational repertoire, as inadequate: witness the androids from movies like Blade Runner, I Robot, Alien, The Terminator, and many others. We routinely transfer our expectations from these fictional examples to real-world efforts like Boston Dynamics’ (now Google’s) Atlas, or SoftBank’s newly announced Pepper. For many practitioners and enthusiasts, AI simply must be mechanically embodied to fulfill the true ambitions of the field. While there is a body of theory to motivate this insistence, the attachment to mechanical form seems more visceral, based on a collective gut feeling that intelligences must move and act in the world to be worthy of our attention. It’s worth noting that, just as recent Turing test results have highlighted the degree to which people are willing to ascribe intelligence to conversation partners, we also place unrealistic expectations on machines with human form.

AI as reasoner and problem-solver. While humanoid robots and disembodied voices have long captured the public’s imagination, whether empathic or psychopathic, early AI pioneers were drawn to more refined and high-minded tasks — playing chess, solving logical proofs, and planning complex tasks. In a much-remarked collective error, they mistook the tasks that were hardest for smart humans to perform (those that seemed by introspection to require the most intellectual effort) for those that would be hardest for machines to replicate. As it turned out, computers excel at these kinds of highly abstract, well-defined jobs. But they struggle at the things we take for granted — things that children and many animals perform expertly, such as smoothly navigating the physical world. The systems and methods developed for games like chess are completely useless for real-world tasks in more varied environments.Taken to its logical conclusion, though, this is the scariest version of AI for those who warn about the dangers of artificial superintelligence. This stems from a definition of intelligence that is “an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments.” What if an AI was as good at general problem-solving as Deep Blue is at chess? Wouldn’t that AI be likely to turn those abilities to its own improvement?

AI as big-data learner. This is the ascendant archetype, with massive amounts of data being inhaled and crunched by Internet companies (and governments). Just as an earlier age equated machine intelligence with the ability to hold a passable conversation or play chess, many current practitioners see AI in the prediction, optimization, and recommendation systems that place ads, suggest products, and generally do their best to cater to our every need and commercial intent. This version of AI has done much to propel the field back into respectability after so many cycles of hype and relative failure — partly due to the profitability of machine learning on big data. But I don’t think the predominant machine-learning paradigms of classification, regression, clustering, and dimensionality reduction contain sufficient richness to express the problems that a sophisticated intelligence must solve. This hasn’t stopped AI from being used as a marketing label — despite the lingering stigma, this label is reclaiming its marketing mojo.

Each archetype is embedded in a deep mesh of associations, assumptions, and historical and fictional narratives that work together to suggest the technologies most likely to succeed, the potential applications and risks, the timeline for development, and the “personality” of the resulting intelligence. I’d go so far as to say that it’s impossible to talk and reason about AI without reference to some underlying characterization. Unfortunately, even sophisticated folks who should know better are prone to switching mid-conversation from one version of AI to another, resulting in arguments that descend into contradiction or nonsense. This is one reason that much AI discussion is so muddled — we quite literally don’t know what we’re talking about.

For example, some of the confusion about deep learning stems from it being placed in multiple buckets: the technology has proven itself successful as a big-data learner, but this achievement leads many to assume that the same techniques can form the basis for a more complete interlocutor, or the basis of intelligent robotic behavior. This confusion is spurred by the Google mystique, including Larry Page’s stated drive for conversational search.

It’s also important to note that there are possible intelligences that fit none of the most widely held stereotypes: that are not linguistically sophisticated; that do not possess a traditional robot embodiment; that are not primarily goal driven; and that do not sort, learn, and optimize via traditional big data.

Which of these archetypes do I find most compelling? To be honest, I think they all fall short in one way or another. In my next post, I’ll put forth a new conception: AI as model-building. While you might find yourself disagreeing with what I have to say, I think we’ll at least benefit from having this debate explicitly, rather than talking past each other.

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Richard Green

There are lots of different kinds of human “intelligence”.
Street smarts, math smarts, wood lore, social skill, verbal skill, game skill, eye-hand coordination, situation awareness, spatial orientation.
Human collectives also demonstrate “intelligence”:
building large systems (e.g. Apollo), operating large organizations.
Why should we expect artificial intelligence to be any less diverse?

http://doubleclix.wordpress.com/ Krishna Sankar

Good points. Yep, the term AI is used everywhere, many times not in the right context. Contemporary AI has evolved – the focus is on “Think Like Humans” & “Augmented Cognition” rather than the legacy expert systems that focused on “Work like Humans”. Transcendence not withstanding, Contemporary
Artificial Intelligence & Feature Learning are being explored for the next
evolution of Machine Learning, Inferences & Insights. May be Artificial Intelligence is not the right moniker, especially as the machines learn to think from the workings of our brains ! [http://goo.gl/Ypr6oO]
Cheers

Jay Kapor

I’m impressed, I must say. Very rarely do I come across a blog that’s both
informative and entertaining, and let me tell you, you’ve hit the nail on the
head. Your blog is important; the issue is something that not enough people are
talking intelligently about.

“For example, some of the confusion about deep learning stems from it being placed in multiple buckets: the technology has proven itself successful as a big-data learner, but this achievement leads many to assume that the same techniques can form the basis for a more complete interlocutor, or the basis of intelligent robotic behavior. This confusion is spurred by the Google mystique, including Larry Page’s stated drive for conversational search.”

“Deep Learning” is another term with multiple meanings. If one uses it to just refer to complex neural nets (which is not what it means to specialists), then i’m not so sure it can’t “form the basis for a more complex interlocuter” — e.g. something like this

There are a couple more things I thought I’d add here that I haven’t said already. First, I strongly agree with the main premise of your original article, namely that definitions really matter when discussing whether something really is or is not “artificial intelligence.” If your definition is loose enough, a child’s doll that utters prerecorded phrases can be considered “intelligent,” and the children who play with those dolls may in fact sometimes even think that their toys have minds and personalities. At a somewhat higher level of complexity, computers that speak like Siri or that play chess or compete on Jeopardy display enough of the behaviors we associate with human reasoning for someone to reasonably claim that they have created a form of artificial intelligence. If all they’re trying to do is create some useful software that mimics intelligent behavior, that’s a perfectly reasonable reasoanble definition.

Second, though, I think it is worth exploring people’s motivations for coining the term “artificial intelligence.” If all we really wanted was to make some useful tools, we wouldn’t call them “intelligent.” We’d just say they were useful. A lot of the excitement and interest in artificial intelligence comes from another motivation: a near-religious excitement about the possibility of doing something that seems godlike and creating new forms of sentient life ourselves.Even if we don’t express that idea in explicitly religious terms, there is still an emotion in the air that says creating machines which think the way we do would be really, really cool. That emotion is certainly understandable (I feel it myself), but it probably motivates people to want to see success at building AI even when all they’ve done is create an ingenious algorithm.

The other thing that probably creates a tendency to see success too early is the human tendency to anthropomorphize. We have a natural tendency to create artifacts that resemble ourselves and to associate human qualities even with things that don’t resemble us. Ancient Greek mythology saw intelligent spirits that they called “gods” creating all of the motion in the world — thunder, lightning, seasons, etc. Even with clearly inanimate objects like a car or a TV set that isn’t working properly, we’ll get angry and curse at them as though we’re dealing with a person who is just being uncooperative. My wife has all kinds of stories that she tells about our cat George, in which she attributes motives and reasoning to him that probably have more to do with her thought patterns than with his. She does the same thing with Siri on her iPhone. I’ve seen her have actual arguments with Siri in which she gets angry because Siri gives the wrong response: “No, no, I told you already that’s not what I meant. Why won’t you listen?” Siri is just good enough at mimicking human behavior that it’s easy to fill in the blanks with our habitual tendency to project human attributes onto inanimate objects and think we’re dealing with another intelligent entity.

I expect, therefore, that we’ll continue to see successful new products emerge in the marketplace that mimic human intelligence or that augment intelligence in various ways. They’ll be useful and entertaining, but we’re probably quite some ways away still from producing intelligence that truly possesses self-awareness or is capable of independent, original thought. It’s going to be fun to see what people come up with though.

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